Grainy days and Mondays: Superstar and bootleg aesthetics

Camera Obscura

Volumn 19, Issue 3, 2004, Pages 57-91

  Hilderbrand, Lucas ^a  

^a NEW YORK UNIVERSITY   (United States)

Author keywords

[No Author keywords available]

Indexed keywords

EID: 60950068721     PISSN: 02705346     EISSN: None     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.1215/02705346-19-3_57-57     Document Type: Review

References (36)

1. See, for example, Coco Fusco, "Regimes of Normalcy," Afterimage, 16 (1988): 18.
2. Peter Biskind, Down and Dirty Pictures: Miramax, Sundance, and the Rise of Independent Film (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2004), 108.
3. Biskind inaccurately called the film "a flop downtown." It may have faced initial rejection from programmers, but it quickly found audiences. The film eventually screened at the Collective for Living Cinema on April Fools' Day, 1988. Film listings, New York Times, 1 April 1988.
4. J. Hoberman, "Valley of the Dolls," Village Voice, 24 November 1987, 67.
5. Lisa Kennedy, "Doll Boy," Village Voice, 24 November 1987, 68.
6. Barbara Kruger, "Into Thin Air," Artforum, December 1987, 108.
7. The show was organized by William Olander and opened 20 November 1987. See New Museum: Exhibition History, www.newmuseum.org/more_exh_s_studies.php (accessed 7 June 2003).
8. Rhonda Lieberman, "Todd Haynes's Superstar," Artforum, April 2003, 93;
9. Stephen Koch, "Andy Warhol, 1928-1987," Artforum, April 2003, 94.
10. Alice Echols, "Low-Impact Horror: Todd Haynes Talks about His New Movie, Safe," LA Weekly, 30 June 1995.
11. Lawrence Van Gelder, "Arts Briefing," New York Times, 31 December 2003, archived online at www.nytimes.com. Information about The Distorted Barbie can be found at users.rcn.com/napier.interport/barbie/barbie. html (accessed 8 August 2003), including a link to reproductions of the 10 October 1997 letter that Mattel sent to Napier's Web site host. Barbie Can Also Be Sad presents dolls of various genders (including an intersex Barbie with male genitalia) involved in an orgy. Mattel intervened in a screening of the tape in Mexico, although it had already screened in the United States as part of MIX NYC in 2001 and at the San Francisco International Lesbian and Gay Film Festival in 2002. Other post-Superstar Barbie-centric video productions include the Barbie Liberation Organization's BLO Nightly News (1994), Paper Tiger TV's Twist Barbie: Lynn, Spigel Dreams of Plastic Feminism (1994), and Joe Gibbons's Barbie's Audition (1995) and Multiple Barbie (1998).
12. On genericide, see Rosemary J. Coombe, The Cultural Life of Intellectual Properties: Authorship, Appropriation, and the Law (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 1998), 79-82.
13. Manohla Dargis, "Toward Director's Chair," Interview, May 1990, 30.
14. For an excellent, humanities-friendly introduction to copyright law, see Martha Buskirk, "Commodification as Censor: Copyright and Fair Use," October, no. 60 (1992): 83-109.
15. Fair use formed part of the major revisions of copyright law enacted in 1976; like the concept of public domain, it is premised on the belief that educational, critical, and creative uses of existing works are for the public good. In the late 1970s, Betamax video recorders were targeted in a major lawsuit, Sony v. Universal, in which Hollywood studios alleged that the machine was a copyright-infringing device. In the early eighties, the suit was appealed to the Supreme Court, which found for Sony because of the machine's potential for noninfringing uses, effectively allowing for the mass personal use of VCRs. See Ronald V. Bettig, Copyrighting Culture: The Political Economy of Intellectual Property (Boulder, CO: Westview, 1996), 151-87.
16. The Blinding Light, www.blindinglight.com/prog.asp (accessed 7 June 2003).
17. See Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media: The Extensions of Man (1964; Cambridge: Massachusetts Institute of Technology Press, 1994).
18. More recent uses are too numerous to recount in detail, but for an excellent discussion of contemporary video art, see Malcolm Turvey et al., "Round Table: The Projected Image in Contemporary Art," October, no. 104 (2003): 71-96.
19. Cultural memory, as affected history, is often mediated through popular culture texts and composed of recalled or revived personal pleasures that would otherwise go unrecorded. See Lynn Spigel and Henry Jenkins, "Same Bat Channel, Different Bat Times: Mass Culture and Popular Memory," in The Many Lives of the Batman: Critical Approaches to a Superhero and His Media, ed. Roberta E. Pearson and William Uricchio (New York: Routledge, 1991), 117-48;
20. Marita Sturken, Tangled Memories: The Vietnam War, the AIDS Epidemic, and the Politics of Remembering (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1997);
21. Lynn Spigel, "From the Dark Ages to the Golden Age: Women's Memories and Television Reruns," in Welcome to the Dreamhouse: Popular Media and Postwar Suburbs (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2001), 357-80;
22. Michael Zryd, "Found Footage Film as Discursive Metahistory," Moving Image 3 (2003): 40-61.
23. Marita Sturken writes on video art that explores cultural memory while negotiating the medium's tendency toward physical decay: "While the notion of a video databank utopically envisioned by these collectives conjured up alternative histories stored neatly in electronic space and accessible to everyone, in reality tapes are material objects that stick, erode, and warp. Yet in this dual role of image retention and loss, video has increasingly become a medium in which issues of collective and individual memory are being examined." Marita Sturken, "The Politics of Video Memory: Electronic Erasures and Inscriptions," in Resolutions: Contemporary Video Practices, ed. Michael Renov and Erika Suderberg (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1996), 3-4.
24. K. Burdette, "Queer Readings/Queer Cinema: An Examination of the Early Work of Todd Haynes," Velvet Light Trap 41 (1998): 75.
25. Roger Hallas, "AIDS and Gay Cinephilia," Camera Obscurci, no. 52 (2003): 87-89.
26. Quoted in Chuck Stephens, "Gentlemen Prefer Haynes: Of Dolls, Dioramas, and Disease: Todd Haynes' Safe Passage," Film Comment, July-August 1995, 77.
27. Brian Larkin, "Degraded Images, Distorted Sounds: Nigerian Video and the Infrastructure of Piracy," Public Culture 16 (2004): 289-314.
28. Laura Marks, "Loving a Disappearing Image," in Touch: Sensuous Theory and Multisensory Media (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), 109.
29. Roland Barthes, "Death of the Author," in Image Music Text, trans. Stephen Heath (New York: Noonday, 1977), 146.
30. Christian Metz, The Imaginary Signifier: Psychoanalysis and Cinema, trans. Celia Britton et al. (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1982), 45-49.
31. Marks, "Loving a Disappearing Image," 97.
32. Metz, The Imaginary Signifier, 59.
33. Catherine Grant and Tahani Nadim, "'Working Things Out Together': The Jovs of Bootlegging, Bartering, and Collectivity," Parachute, July-September 2003, 53.
34. Writing on television tapers and cassette collectors, Kim Bjarkman addresses "self-fashioned archives" of ephemeral broadcasts in an excellent and relevant article published as this essay was in the final proofing stages. Bjarkman, "To Have and to Hold: The Video Collector's Relationship with an Ethereal Medium," Television and New Media 5 (2004): 217-46.
35. Charles Tashiro, "The Contradictions of Video Collecting," Film Quarterly 45 (1991): 12.
36. Jean Baudrillard, "The System of Collecting," trans. Roger Cardinal, in Cultures of Collecting, ed. John Eisner and Roger Cardinal (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1994), 12.